2010 starts with more health care nonsense. Also, Alison Piepmeier talks about girl zines, and Tiger Woods sex scandal gets bizarrely political.

 

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Links in this episode:

Rape in the military

Dick Morris goes full wingnut

Sarah Palin beats on the "death panels" thing

Bart Stupak throws a pity party

Girl Zines

Brit Hume tries to convert Tiger Woods

Don Imus corrects the record

Pat Buchanan sides with Hume

The Daily Show makes fun of it all

Scott Lively praises harsh homophobia in Uganda

 

On this episode of Reality Cast, an interview with Alison
Piepmeier about her new book on the girl zine culture, its history and present.
Also, the religious right continues to dominate the conservative discourse on
health care, and I finally am forced to talk about the Tiger Woods sex scandal.

 

Not that this story is especially new, but a documentary has
been made about rape in the military. 

 

• military
  *

 

Apparently, the number of reports of rape are soaring
upwards as the war drags on.  I’m
not surprised that this ongoing war with no end in sight is encouraging
nihilistically violent male behavior.

***********

Hey, 2010!  Hope
y’all had a good vacation.  I spent
mine catching up on some reading, so it was kind of like work, because I read
some feminist stuff.  But it was
older feminist stuff, from the 70s, namely works of the famous pro-sex,
pro-pleasure feminist Ellen Willis. 
There was a quote from an essay she wrote in 1980 that gave me the
chills, it was so perceptive.  I
quote:

 

The antiabortion movement is the
most dangerous political force in the country. I believe—and in saying this I
intend no hyperbole whatsoever—that it is the cutting edge of neo-fascism, a
threat not only to women’s rights and to everyone’s sexual freedom and privacy
but to freedom of religion and civil liberties in general.

 

What was interesting was how right Willis was to see that
the anti-choice movement was really gearing up to be the front lines in pushing
a hardcore right wing agenda.  This
has become even more true than she 
predicted 30 years ago.  And
really, until this past year, I don’t think most liberals saw that.  But the murder of Dr. George Tiller
plus the way abortion was used as a Trojan horse strategy against general
health care reform put a lot of doubts to rest. 

 

What all this means is that so-called pro-life movement has
really played a major role in creating hysteria over health care reform, and
certainly that didn’t slow down much over the holiday.  What was interesting was that while
abortion was the big anti-choice bullet to shoot at health care reform, the
death panels thing, like all right wing memes, was far from dead and made a
resurgence.  Dick Morris trotted it
out on "Fox and Friends". 

 

• health
  care 1 *

 

This, of course, is an utter lie.  It is true that some tumors are so slow-growing that it’s
better not to put a very old person through chemo who will die of natural
causes before the cancer gets to them, but that choice is usually made by
doctors.  And it’s not to save
costs, but to not kill someone or ruin someone’s last years with chemo.  Lies like this get at the weird
insinuation that anti-choicers make, which is that the only reason that there’s
death is someone screwed up.  Not
true.  It’s coming for all of us, and
doctors have an obligation not to promise immortality when they can’t deliver.

 

Sarah Palin hasn’t given up promoting the zombie lie,
either.

 

• health
  care 2 *

 

Of course, all this is meant to distract from the fact that
the current system is what kills people, by rationing their health care by not
offering it at all to people with pre-existing conditions, especially if their
employers don’t cover it. But I think conservatives get that. They just think
that if someone poor gets health care, they won’t. It’s a lot like the way
anti-abortion people imagine that if someone else gets away with having sex,
they lose out. 

 

Not that abortion is going away as a scare tactic, by any
means.  Bart Stupak is doing what
wingnuts do best, which is playing the victim, with Fox News offering an
assist.

 

• health
  care 3 *

 

Only in the upside down world of right wing propaganda is it
crazy and wrong and beyond the pale for leaders in a party to try to exert
their power on representatives who are flouting the party line.  Next week: commentators on Fox News act
horrified that politicians who support health care reform continue to get 8
hours of sleep a night, like they not only deserve to live, but also to get
rest.

 

************

insert interview

************

I thought there would be a small chance that I would be
able, especially due to the holiday, to avoid doing a segment addressing the
baffling controversy over Tiger Woods’ infidelities.  And I say "baffling", because I simply cannot and will not
believe that anyone is genuinely shocked that a world famous athlete who has
people singing his praises all day and night might have both the opportunities
to cheat and the entitlement issues to do it.  Since I refuse to believe anyone is reacting out of genuine
shock or moral outrage, I’m forced to conclude that the whole controversy is
being conducted for the same reason any disingenuous sex stuff gets into the
public consciousness, which is that it’s an excuse for the right to start
pushing their agenda on the public. 

 

Luckily for my theory, it was neatly proven true by Fox News
pundit Brit Hume, who decided this was a good time to make a strike for
Christian dominance. 

 

• tiger
  1 *

 

Of course, there’s no reason to think that non-Christians
have no idea of what it means to seek self-betterment or redemption, or to
think that Christians are exempt from doing hurtful things.  In fact, Don Imus actually took it upon
himself to correct Hume’s assumption, even while blowing smoke up his ass about
how he’s so great blah blah.

 

• tiger
  2 *

 

What I think was interesting about this whole thing is that
Hume, by rushing forward  with this
nonsense, really revealed something about the American religious right that
they might otherwise take pains to conceal.  And it’s this: They seem to think that sex is their
property.  Or to be more specific,
that sexual sin is.  The idea that
Buddhists are just dandy with cheating on your wife is a weird assumption, but
if you think about where Hume is coming from, it makes sense.  This in turn should tell you something
else.  The right isn’t interested
in controlling sexuality because of babies or family values per se, but you
already knew that.  Nor does it
have much to do with "life".  But
it does have everything to do with social control and dominance, and part of
that agenda is asserting that Christianity is, if not an official state
religion, a de facto state religion. 
And sex is just a tool they use as part of that agenda.

 

The much-touted hostility to secularism is fundamentally a
hostility to diversity, since, after all, true respect for a diverse population
would mean not singling out one belief system as dominant in the public
square.  But they can’t come right
out and say this, so instead they lean on sexual hysteria and judgments to
smuggle that message in.  Which is
why Hume got support from some interesting characters, like Pat Buchanan.  

 

• tiger
  3 *

 

He dissembled more, suggesting that at best this was Hume
being impolite instead of being a real meathead. But Buchanan supported the
idea of shaming Woods for his religion and suggesting that all Buddhists
everywhere are big ol’ fans of adultery. 
And that it was fine to do this without knowing the first thing about
Buddhism.  Look, I’m no expert on
world religions, but any fool could tell you that it’s unlikely that a major
religion is going to really valorize disruptive behavior like adultery.  Of course, these two clowns probably
don’t realize Buddhism is a major religion.

 

Like I said, what should be clear is this: The Christian
right has decided that sex is their gateway to push their other ideas,
especially their hostility to diversity and religious freedom.  When it comes to female sexuality,
people have enough guilt and sexism to be unable to see this.  But now that it’s a very wealthy man
whose sexual dalliances are being used as an excuse to attack him for being
different, I hope people see this.  The Daily Show certainly did.

 

• tiger
  4 *

 

**********

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, but you just said, oh
wait, you were full of it edition. 
Scott Lively, who was one of the organizers of an anti-gay rally that
set off Ugandan legislators to write a law that could punish homosexuality by
death, is running around claiming that he didn’t want it to happen that
way.  But it’s hard to believe him,
when he says stuff like this.

 

• lively
  *

 

Yeah, so there you go. I fail to see how Uganda could step
much further in the direction Lively wants. What can you do worse than killing
people?  Desecrating their corpses?  The good news is that the wingnuts who
supported this murderous legislation aren’t being able to run from it like
they’d like, and their true ugly selves are coming out.